Leave a comment Joanna Hogg and the Art of Life For many, the disorder can severely affect quality of life: About half of those with OCD experience serious impairment as obsessions and compulsions take time away from work, relationships, and even more basic functions like dressing and eating. Today, studies indicate about 2.3 percent of American adults have had or currently have OCD. But starting in the 1980s, researchers like Rapoport began to find that the “doubting disease,” as some patients called it, was much more common and more responsive to treatment than previously imagined. But, on another level, Rapoport wrote, he just couldn’t be sure.įor most of the 20th century, OCD - defined by obsessive thoughts, compulsive rituals, or a combination of the two - was considered a rare and incurable illness. On some level, Arnie probably knew the papers had been delivered successfully, that he wasn’t going to kill his family, and that the storeroom was sufficiently ordered. In his 20s, he got a job in a shoe store but felt compelled, when sorting shoes by size and style, to never repeat any action six or 13 times. He never felt as though he could shower or dress “right.” His days were disrupted by violent thoughts about hurting his family members. As Arnie grew older, his preoccupations began to morph. “As soon as he had checked it, and turned to face the new work, the feeling came over him: ‘I had better make sure.’” Around and around he’d go, unable to break the cycle.Īrnie’s case was one of dozens of stories that Rapoport, a child psychiatrist, recounted in her book, one of the first accessible accounts of the disorder written from a doctor’s perspective. Rapoport wrote in The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing, her 1989 bestseller about treating people with obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD. He could never be sure the papers had actually been delivered. “After Arnie had finished a block, he had to go back to be sure that there was a paper on each and every doorstop,” Judith L. The work troubled him, however - and not in the usual way a kid might worry about their first adult responsibility. Godine, 1991 Leave a comment What we don’t know about OCDĪt 13, Arnie got a paper route. Will the crowdsĪ blight on the idiocy of the Christian Right! The power dynamics have shifted but remain unbalanced and entangled with complex threads of post-colonial identity. But English’s primacy rests on centuries of violence and exploitation. Having a lingua franca brings great benefits for travel, business, politics, and research: witness the speed at which Covid-19 vaccines were developed through international scientific collaboration. Her impressive book (sent to me by OUP for review) does much to clarify the forces behind English’s position as a lingua franca and what the future might hold. Tackling this topic is a new book, The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language, by Rosemary Salomone, a linguist and law professor in New York.
Latin’s time as the default international language of learning ended long ago English’s status as a lingua franca is still broader but very much in flux – and politically fraught, simultaneously uniting and dividing the world. Nowadays that phrase tends to be applied to Latin or English. Based originally on Italian and Occitano-Romance languages, it had indirect ties to the Germanic Franks and thus gained the term lingua franca. For much of the previous millennium, a pidgin language was used around the Mediterranean for trading, diplomatic, and military purposes.